CyberGhost vs. ExpressVPN

CyberGhost and ExpressVPN are two of the top VPNs today. They may not be the highest-rated VPNs, but after testing both of them, we can say with confidence that they are great for protecting your privacy, accessing websites that may be blocked in your country, or unblocking geo-restricted content, like Netflix libraries outside your region.

Of course, you can only use one VPN at a time, so if CyberGhost and ExpressVPN are your two top options, you’ll have to decide which to use. To help you with that, we’ll highlight the main comparison points between the two options and give you our recommendations. Here’s CyberGhost versus ExpressVPN!

Stuff In Common

First, let’s make sure that you’re in the right ballpark. Here’s what CyberGhost and ExpressVPN had in common.

• Non-members to Five Eyes, Nine Eyes and 14 Eyes: Since ExpressVPN is based in the British Virgin Islands and CyberGhost is based in Romania, neither company could ever be forced to give our data to the government, as neither country is a member of surveillance alliances. Score one for our digital privacy!
• Kill switches: If either VPN closed or lost connection, our web browsers would too, keeping our activity hidden from our Internet Service Provider (ISP).

• Torrenting: Not only is torrenting possible with CyberGhost and ExpressVPN, they are also two of the most secure VPNs for torrenting privately. Now, we don’t condone piracy, but if you’re a torrent user who downloads legal and non-copyrighted material via P2P connections, feel free to choose between CyberGhost and ExpressVPN.
• Split tunneling: Sometimes, we don’t want all of our web traffic to be routed through our VPN; not all of it includes our sensitive information, like when we play Solitaire online during conference calls (we’re listening too, we swear!). CyberGhost and ExpressVPN let us choose which traffic we wanted to go through the encrypted tunnel and which traffic was okay to go straight to the public Wi-Fi network, which even helped our speeds, a little.
• Netflix access: There’s nothing worse than crawling into bed with a bowl of popcorn, turning on your VPN, choosing that dumb romantic comedy about the Christmas Prince on Netflix, and clicking play, only to see that dreaded error code. You know the one, the one that says “You seem to be using an unblocker or proxy”.1 While there are many advantages to using a VPN to watch Netflix, like accessing other countries’ entertainment options, Netflix hates VPNs and blocks their servers on an ongoing basis, so while we were able to watch Netflix with CyberGhost and ExpressVPN turned on, we can’t guarantee that this will be true forever, or on all servers.
• AES-256: Both VPNs use the highest encryption standard, namely AES-256.2 That’s important because it’s how our web activity is actually shielded from view.
• No leaks: We always test our VPNs not only for their speed, which is important to us, but also for their actual security. We want to make that that our domain names and IP addresses are truly hidden from our ISP with the VPN on, and ExpressVPN and CyberGhost passed with flying colors.

• Unlimited server switches: Being the experience-enthralled millennials that we are, we travel all over the world, connecting to different VPN servers along the way. But with CyberGhost and ExpressVPN, we could change servers as many times as we wanted under our subscriptions.
• Apps for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS and Linux: Both CyberGhost and ExpressVPN have apps for the main types of devices that we use, including Mac and Windows computers as well as iPhones and Androids.
• Live chat support: When we had questions, we simply live chatted with the support staff from either VPN company, which gave us faster responses than filling out an online form.

Stuff That’s Different

Now let’s get to the good stuff. CyberGhost and ExpressVPN are ultimately two different VPNs. They may share the same goal and some features, but these differences are more likely going to be your biggest deciding factors:

Privacy policies: Privacy is one of the main reasons why people use VPNs, according to our VPN usage study. 40 percent of VPN users use the services for general privacy, so looking at a VPN’s privacy policy is essential. If you’re part of that 40 percent, we recommend ExpressVPN over CyberGhost. Why? Because CyberGhost stored users’ IP addresses and timestamps of connections, while ExpressVPN does not. While neither VPN will log users’ actual web activity, we like to keep our originating IP addresses private, so CyberGhost was a little disappointing in this respect, although they stored our IP addresses in an anonymized format.

*anonymized

• Number of countries with servers: Right now, ExpressVPN has servers in more countries than any other VPN. It has servers in 105 countries. Now, CyberGhost isn’t too far behind; it has servers in 100 countries. That said, ExpressVPN takes this one by a hair.
• Speeds: Now, speed is something that’s influenced by a number of factors like distance to the server, device type, operating system, browser type, and more, so we urge you to take our speed test results with several large grains of salt. That being said, CyberGhost was faster for us, especially on Macs. No wonder we named it our best VPN for Mac!

• Pricing: There’s no other way around it; ExpressVPN is more expensive than most VPNs you’ll encounter, including CyberGhost. In contrast, CyberGhost is one of the cheapest VPNs. You can get CyberGhost for as low as $2.19 per month if you sign up for two years, while ExpressVPN’s lowest pricing is $8.32 per month if you sign up for a year ($6.67 when there are discounts).

If you want to see the pricing in detail, read our ExpressVPN pricing and CyberGhost pricing pages, or compare ExpressVPN to another top VPN in ExpressVPN vs. NordVPN.

• Number of simultaneous connections per subscription: This is neck and neck, because ExpressVPN allows up to eight devices to connect at a time, while CyberGhost has a seven-device limit.
• Apps for Blackberry, routers and Kindle: Although these VPNs work with the most popular types of devices, ExpressVPN also worked with Kindle e-readers, routers and Blackberrys, so if those are the devices you want to encrypt, ExpressVPN is the choice for you.

Which One Would We Recommend?

Overall, we’d recommend ExpressVPN over CyberGhost due to its more robust privacy policy, dynamic IP addresses and a greater number of servers and countries. However, if you’re on a budget, CyberGhost is a better option, especially if you want to connect more than five devices at a time.

Want to look closer at either VPN and our testing process? Read our ExpressVPN review and our CyberGhost review. All in all, they’re both great options, but since people have their personal preferences and needs, we like to provide as much detailed information as possible.